Host: … It’s 9:15.

Host: And what a treat for us. CSI returns tonight at 9 on CBS. Ladies and gentlemen, Jorja Fox right now on the Kevin and Bean show.

Jorja: Aw, thank you!

Host: More importantly, Sara Sidle returns tonight. That’s what I care about.

Host 2: Yes! Yes yes yes.!

Jorja: Thank you so much!

Host: What your character has been put through in the course of this series, Jorja-

Jorja: My goodness gracious! Right?

Host: – is been ridiculous!

Jorja: Yeah, I would have to agree. But happily so. It’s been so much fun to do all that stuff.

Host: Great stuff to play, I’m sure.

Jorja: There was one episode alone where I felt like the writers were trying to kill me. Just about every way that you could try to kill somebody on this show.

Host: They crushed you with a car, I remember that.

Jorja: Yeah! There was under the car, there was getting thrown out of the car, there was a fistfight, there was walking through the desert. You know, pretty much, yeah! The whole episode.

Host: And then they sent you off to Costa Rica. And now you’re back.

Jorja: Yeah, that’s where we’ve last seen Sara. That was a big moment, cause there Billy and I were, under the sort of like, the Costa Rican canopy, and it was-

Host: By Billy you mean William Petersen?

Jorja: William Petersen, of course, yes. He plays Grissom.

Host 2: I’m gonna start calling him Billy! I like that!

Jorja: Only it may be a little overly familiar! But I thought “Well, this might be it!” You know, “This might be the end of Sara’s chapter, it might be the last time I’m here.” So I was very surprised to get a call this summer.

Host: And that time, you came back cause Warrick got shot. Right? That was the circumstance?

Jorja: Yeah, well that was, you know, that’s still something that’s sort of a touchy subject. I wish that Warrick was alive out there, somewhere. But. Warrick was murdered, before the last scene where Billy goes to Costa Rica. So the last time we see –

Host 2: Oh! that’s right that’s right!

Jorja: – William Petersen and Sara Sidle, is in a Costa Rican rainforest.

Host 2: My timeline was off.

Host: Well, you know, Jorja, time travel is very big on TV these days. Isn’t it possible that you guys could go back to just before he was shot and stop it? Save him? Put him back on the show?

Jorja: I- You know, I’ve been pitching a prequel for years! It gets harder and harder. We’re starting our tenth season, so to try and do a prequel means people have to de-age us by a decade. And that’s pretty challenging at this point.

Host 2: Piece of cake! Piece of cake.

Jorja: Maybe the animated prequel.

Host 2: Exactly.

Host: Before we get caught up and talk about what happens tonight, and the return of season 10, there’s no way anyone, in the beginning, thought that CSI would turn into one of the biggest hits in the history of television. When you guys started, I mean, this was something new on network television. Your show came out, doing stuff different. But nobody expected the juggernaut that it became, right?

Jorja: I thought a show about death, on a Friday night, was gonna be a gigantic clunker. Really, terrible, horrible, clunker. But the story was so intriguing to me, I sort of fell under a trance from the moment I read the script. I was like “Alright, well I have to do this!”

Host 2: I think, people take it for granted now, but at the time we had never seen anything like it before on television.

Jorja: Thank you. Well, there was Quincy! That goes back a ways…

Host 2: [Laughs] This is far stretch from Quincy. Forensics have come a long way since Quincy.

Jorja: [Laughs] Yes. And they’re still coming a long way which, I think, is an advantage that we have. New technology is coming out every month, and we can use it.

Host: I remember in the early episodes, where they would follow the path of a bullet into the body, and show you all the damage it does. And your head would explode! You’d never seen anything like it, even in a movie, let alone on television! And then, you thought initially, week to week, solving cases, we’ve seen this done on tons of procedural cop shows, and that kind of stuff.

Jorja: Yeah, it’s one of the standard. The old standards.

Host: But the character development in CSI is what I feel really set it apart. How we got so attached to your characters and followed them through all these different permutations over the years.

Jorja: Like an old suit, from the 70s, slowly but surely-

Host: But you find twenty bucks pockets! Now you must have, in the course of research or just interaction with experts that come by to advice on the show, you must have dealt with a lot of real life C.S.I. people over the years. Who are the people that go into this field, that love this kind of work? What drives them?

Jorja: It’s a very diverse group. I think that there’s a couple things they have to have. They have to have almost like an OCD type of focus, and a patience and a persistence. And I think they’ve got to be very, very, committed to crime fighting. And we still, every day, we have a tech advisor on our set, every day, still trying to help us look as realistic as possible. There’s real crime scene investigators in the writers room almost every day. We have personal relationships with a lot of those guys, both from – The cool thing about our show because we shoot in LA but we take place in Vegas is that we can – if it’s real in either one of those cities, we can put it on air. So we have people from both cities giving us stories and advice.

Host: Oh I see! Are there are lot of women that go into the field? And are there more women going into the field now because of you? And because of Catherine’s character?

Jorja: Well that’s very kind of you. They tell us that that’s true. That yes, there are a lot of women going into the field. One of our first advisors, Liz Devine, was in Los Angeles, a very early sort of woman in the field, and she was blonde and well endowed in all the right places. Sort of faced that textbook stuff you hear about when women enter fields that they’re not traditionally in. More and more so, I think women, if I’m going to get stereotypical, I think women are really, really geared towards the field because of that patience and that persistence.

Host: But they’re not really smart enough though, right?

Jorja: They’re very good at detail oriented work, where you’re on hour eleven and you’re still holding your focus.

Host: Really it’s just puzzle solving more than anything else.

Jorja: Yeah, great big puzzle.

Host: Let me ask you one more question before the break. Jorja Fox is here and will tell you all about the premiere of season ten of CSI. But here’s the question I have to ask, is it true that because of the success of CSI, it is harder now to impress a jury? Or harder to – in many cases a jury will think that they real life is like the television show, and it makes it harder for prosecutors sometimes, when they don’t have the slam dunk, scientific evidence that you often come up with on your show. Have you heard that?

Jorja: What we hear, actually, is the opposite. We hear it’s a lot harder for cops. For instance, I get my car broken into, and a police officer arrives, and I want the crime solved in, like, 48-hours, and I want him to pull out his DNA kit, fingerprinting and stuff. I think, originally, in courtrooms, it made it a little easier, because these guys were pitching this kind of science, for a while, but juries weren’t quite grasping it. Now they have a really good understanding of what all of it means.

Host: Ballistics, GSR, latent GSR! GSR all over his hands!

Host: Laypeople – We amateurs know so much more about police work and science of the C.S.I. than we ever would have thought possible, because you found a way to make it entertaining.

Jorja: Thank you.

Host: CSI returns tonight at 9. A quick break! More with Jorja Fox, if she doesn’t give us all the Swine Flu, when we return, right after this on the Kevin and Bean Show!

[…]

Host: Jorja Fox is in our studio. The return of CSI, season 10, tonight at 9 on CBS. Now because you’re the big dog on the television schedule, every year the other networks try to figure out “How are we going to take CSI down.” “What are we going to do this year to take CSI down?” You have been up against every show in the history of television.

Jorja: True! Yeah, and we’re up against a pretty good one right now, who’s name I can’t mention on the air. But you guys have been promoting it several times this morning.

Lisa (co-host): Oops!

Host: We’re not responsible for commercials.

Jorja: Yeah, little medical drama.

Host: Don’t hold it against us! – OH! That one! Oh that show SUCKS! It’s all CSI! It’s way CSI!

Jorja: Aww! Thank you!

Host: You’re either gay or Lisa if you’re gonna watch that show.

Lisa: It’s just a chick show, yeah.

Host: So Sara returns tonight. Do we find out the state of her relationship with Grissom, while they’ve been away? Do we look into that at all this evening?

Jorja: In about 12 short hours, in Los Angeles, you will. I think you’ll get at least a sort of an establishing amount of information that I was very pleased with.

Host: We’ve all been curious what’s been going on after that kiss in Costa Rica.

Jorja: I think we were in Costa Rica for a nice long time. That’s all I can say at the moment.

Lisa: Got a lot accomplished, did you?

Host: How used to seeing Sara can we get, as fans of the show? You gonna be around for a while, or is this another hit and run? You gonna tease us and run off again? Another foreign country you gonna run off to?

Jorja: I know, right? I keep having these really big, dramatic, goodbyes, and then – It’s like “Oh, gosh! It’s her again!” I think you can’t pull that off that much before – I mean people are already rolling their eyes at me. They’ve done that for years. That will continue, I think, if I keep saying “I’m back! Goodbye!” “Hey, I’m back! Goodbye!”

Host: “But this time I mean it!”

Jorja: “Send me flowers!” No, I’m visiting, and I’m thrilled to do so. As I said, I wasn’t expecting it at all, especially after the Costa Rican episode. SO we’ll see! We’re taking it one day at a time. It’s so much fun, it’s like going home in some respects. In some respects it’s like having a brand new job and being somewhere for the first time. I have so much love and devotion in my heart for everybody there.

Host: How’s Laurence Flishburn- Fishburne to work with.

Jorja: Laurence Flishburn?

[Everyone laughs]

Host: Laurence Flishburn.

Jorja: Notable actor?

Host: Yeah. I’ve started drinking already. Laurence Fishburne, one of my favorite actors, and he’s so good on the show.

Jorja: He is! He’s spectacular.

Host: How exciting is it to work with that stature when you come back to a project like CSI?

Jorja: Very humbly. You know, Liev Schrieber guest stared a couple seasons ago too, and he and Fishburne would be two of my all time favorite actors. It’s just kind of weird that all of the sudden they’re sort of like at your house. You know? Like they knock on the door and you’re like ‘Hey, come on in! Would you like a cup of coffee?’ or something. He’s amazing. He’s as kind and benevolent and generous and sweet and funny as you could ever imagine that he might be.

Host: There’s where you’ve got smart guys and gals running the show. Because when you lose your star, when you lose Mr. Grissom’s character, when you lose that you need a guy with – not only a great actor, but with gravitas. Who can come in and pick up the slack. And he has that. He’s one of those guys, you can’t take your eyes off the screen.

Jorja: Mesmerizing. And he’s sicker than I am and he’s in New York doing the press, so you’ve gotta give him credit for that.

Host: He’s spreading the virus on that coast.

Jorja: We all have the CSI bug, it’s very contagious.

Host: What did you do, when you left the show, about the show? Did you continue to watch it as a fan, or did you not want to see your boyfriend move on with another woman?

Jorja: Yeah! That was scary! And that happened a little bit. Sort of. They left that very ambiguous, thank God. I watched for a while and then I realized, “I’m on sabbatical. I’m taking a year off.” And then I kind of turned off my TV. So for the most part there was very little that I watched, including CSI, in that year. I did a bunch of traveling.

Host: Wow! That’s a surprise.

Jorja: I thought, if I’m really gonna take a year off, as long as my heads in the game, if I’m watching TV every night. But, when they called this summer, I had them TIVO’d, most of them, and I did sit down at watch a lot of them. I still have a couple left to watch. I’ve worked my way up to the season finale of last year, it’s the one episode I haven’t see yet. Which is weird, because we’re premiering tonight, so I’ve probably have to go home and watch it today! I have to watch it this afternoon! And I thought last season was amazing, I thought they did a really great job. It’s really difficult to lose three characters in the space of a year or so. The writers are brilliant. I thought they handled very well, and I thought that – there hasn’t been a ton of subtext on CSI the last year. Everybody’s been grieving the loss of old people, and also hopeful of new folks coming in. I think that played on screen a lot.

Host: And plus, you just want to see McDreamy happy. Right?

Lisa: Not the same show.

Jorja: I’m sorry, who are you? What radio show is this? Where am I?

Lisa: Big boy!

Host: Here’s a tweet question for you, Jorja. Eric wants to know if it’s sometimes hard to act with all the special effects that they use on the show?

Jorja: Eric. To be honest with you, I rarely see the special effects. We’re generally in a stage, we’re in a room. We see more – we see the stunts and the car wrecks and things like that. But a lot of the CSI stuff that they do comes in post-production, which is one of the reasons I actually really watch the show! Because so much of it happens in post. The music gets laid in post. We’re really proud of our music, we’ve had a lot of really amazing bands come through. And I like to watch everybody else’s work and see what they did.

Host: Tonight at nine on CBS. For folks who are gonna try CSI for the first time, or haven’t been paying as close attention as they should, what is the 30-second setup that you give people that are prepared to sit down and watch CSI?

Jorja: Uh …

Host: Ten years of work!

Host: That’s not saying recap every plot point!

Jorja: I gotta pitch it? I can say this. When I read the script this summer, I think, whenever you’ve been on as long as we have – and we’re ooooolllld now, I feel like we’ve got canes and walkers and all kinds of stuff … Geritol. I read the script, I was excited I was coming back, and I was like, “You know, this show’s probably peaked. I’m sure it’s gonna be a great script.” I thought it’s probably … The best is in the past. And when I read the first page of the first scene, I was strapped into a seatbelt and I thought to myself “Game. On.”

Host: Wow! That sounds great.

Lisa: I’m excited!

Host: And I hope that Sara and Catherine will finally act on their long standing attraction to one another.

Jorja: That’s been coming up a lot, actually!

Host: I think it’s about time for that wrinkle to be … on CSI.

Jorja: Someone should get something on CSI!

Host: Exactly!

Host: Well, sweeps have got to be right around the corner. Let’s not be crazy here.

Host: Well, Jorja, so nice to finally meet you. We’ll happily take the Swine Flu from you-

Jorja: Oh, great!

Host: -just because you happen to be here today.

Jorja: Thank you so much for having me, I’m a huge fan. You guys have been so nice to me for such a long time, and it’s really an honor to be here.

Host: Thank you, Jorja. CSI tonight at 9 on CBS!